Dan Kennedy's blog on media and politics • published by the Boston Phoenix from 2002 to 2005

Friday, March 12, 2004

DELAY, DECEIVE - AND
SELF-DESTRUCT?Salon today leads with a long
piece
by veteran Texas journalist Lou Dubose on an investigation into House
majority leader Tom DeLay's vaunted fundraising machine. This is
potentially devastating stuff - though Dubose thinks DeLay himself is
unlikely to be the target of any criminal probe, this could be
embarrassing enough that it makes him a serious liability to the
national Republican Party.

As Dubose observes,
campaign-finance laws in Texas are so loose that you really have to
work hard to run afoul of them. What Travis County district attorney
Ronnie Earle is investigating is whether the DeLay machine - which
funds Republican candidates all over Texas - violated a law against
spending corporate money directly on election campaigns.

Naturally, the Republicans are
responding by trying to pass a state law prohibiting Earle from
investigating political corruption.

MUSH FROM THE WIMPS.National Journal media critic William Powers pokes
fun at Boston Globe
ombudsman Christine Chinlund for agonizing
over a recent Pat Oliphant cartoon that struck some readers as
anti-Catholic. (Via Romenesko.)

And now some mush from this
wimp: I think I'm more with Chinlund and editorial-page editor
Renée Loth than I am with Powers on this. Cruelty in
cartooning can be great, but Oliphant's was gratuitous. Yes, I
laughed, but I'm not a Catholic.

THE STATE OF GAY MARRIAGE.
The Phoenix's Kristen Lombardi argues
that yesterday's action by the constitutional convention - pushing
forward an amendment to ban gay marriage but to create civil unions -
is actually a huge step forward for the gay-and-lesbian civil-rights
movement.

No comments:

About Media Log Archives

The Boston Phoenix's Media Log was launched in 2002 by the paper's then-media columnist, Dan Kennedy, who continued it until he left the paper in 2005. The Phoenix's current media columnist, Adam Reilly, is now the author of Media Log, which has since been renamed Don't Quote Me. Kennedy, an assistant professor of journalism at Northeastern University, blogs at Media Nation.